Blogerim בלוגרים » libraryhttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en
From the corridors of the Jewish Museum BerlinTue, 31 Mar 2015 12:04:37 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1Ich glaub’ nie mehr an eine Frau (Never Trust A Woman)—The Sound for the Filmhttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/02/ich-glaub-nie-mehr-an-eine-frau/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/02/ich-glaub-nie-mehr-an-eine-frau/#commentsWed, 04 Feb 2015 23:11:44 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=3080There are films slumbering in an archive somewhere, waiting to be discovered. And there are films that have sunk into oblivion but then suddenly pop up again, in the form of a soundtrack.

Recently, when stock was being moved to another depot, our colleague Regina Wellen looked over the collection of 78rpm schellac records with a view to devising a new way of storing them. She thereby came across eleven not yet inventoried records, much larger than the usual sort and with a label suggestive of some other purpose than easy listening on the home gramophone. Luckily for us, Regina was quickly able to establish that these were examples of the sound-on-disc recordings played in cinemas as an accompaniment to screenings of otherwise silent films—synchronously, thanks to the built-in start signal. One of the twenty numbered boxes on each label used to be checked after each screening, so as to ensure that a worn-out record would be replaced in good time. After Regina had dry-cleaned the records and prepared appropriate packaging for them, she set about digitizing their content under the supervision of Nadja Wallaszkovits of the Austrian Audiovisual Research Archive in Vienna—this latter task as part of her Bachelors degree course at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences.

We are now in possession of the complete soundtrack for the film Ich glaub‘ nie mehr an eine Frau (Never Trust A Woman, 1929/30), which starred Richard Tauber and Gustav Gründgens and was directed by Max Reichmann, with musical direction by Paul Dessau. This film from the early days of cinema was believed to be completely lost —and, sadly, the motion footage still is. Its plot revolves around the celebrated singer Stefan (Richard Tauber), who goes to sea following an unrequited love affair, and a sailor (Werner Fuetterer), who returns home from a voyage and falls in love with a woman whom he is not supposed to love. In order to do justice to the rich timbre of Richard Tauber’s voice, the Tri-Ergon Musik AG in Berlin used its freshly patented optical sound recording technology. This method assured such a substantial improvement in quality that Siegfried Kracauer, writing in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 1 March 1930, described the sound as the most outstanding feature of Ich glaub‘ nie mehr an eine Frau: “Tauber’s voice in this film sounds perfectly pure, its nuances are faithfully reproduced and all the voices come out of the right mouths at the right moment.”

Illustrierter Filmkurier (Illustrated Film Courier) 12.1930, No. 1341

When Regina brought me the digitized film recording in various formats (which will facilitate audio restoration at a later date) for storage in the media archive, we thought about how best to archive it, long term, and also about how to ensure that the sound-on-disc recording could be easily traced if ever the film footage were found. We decided to hand over a copy of the digitized recording to the Deutsche Kinemathek. But what is a film without images? Well, you can enjoy at least a taste of how the film sounds, here, or come and listen to the complete soundtrack in the Reading Room of the Academy—and leave the images to your mind’s eye.

Richard Tauber, Paul Hörbiger, Werner Fuetterer are speaking. This is the first dialog after the intro and some indistinct voices. Then Tauber sings “Übers Meer grüß ich dich, Heimatland” (Homeland, I greet you from overseas); lyrics by Fritz Rotter.

Tracing the provenance of the artifacts held in our archive is another part of our work—yet we are unable to say with any certainty where the eleven sound-on-disc recordings come from. The Jewish Museum Berlin either acquired them in 1999 as part of an extensive package of over three hundred Richard Tauber schellac records or they somehow mysteriously made their way from the Tri-Ergon Company at Ritterstraße 43 to us here, at Lindenstraße 9-14: a distance as the crow flies of only 250 meters.

The library of the Jewish Museum Berlin is growing day by day. Since early 2014, this has been particularly noticeable in the Jewish visual and applied arts section, which currently stocks about 10,000 media objects (books, journals, non-book media, etc.). As part of the framework of a project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), which I have been working on for the past year, our team has had the opportunity to make essential acquisitions and to close existing gaps in this area. Further expansion is planned—and will take us another big step towards our goal of establishing a research library for Jewish art and cultural history.

Before the first Jewish visual and applied arts publications arrived at the library, there were many tasks to be performed: first and foremost, to settle the question, “What do we want to collect?” In consultation with the museum curators we defined the focal points of our acquisition policy. For instance, we decided to collect German titles on topics or people from German-speaking countries as comprehensively as possible. When it comes to publications on Jewish art from other countries, however, especially from the non-European ones, we decided to generally collect only standard works of reference. Similarly with Israeli art we will acquire only selected literature on certain topics and artists. This is due to the fact that the DFG Special Collection on Israel in the University Library of Frankfurt am Main covers the field extensively.

In order to ensure that our collection will remain easily accessible to a broad public even after the planned acquisition of a further 2,000 items, we created a better, more highly differentiated classification system right at the start of the project. Searching for a specific publication among the many diverse subject areas in our library is now easier than ever.

My work essentially consists of trawling specialized bibliographies and library catalogs in order to identify relevant literature. Our curators are another vital source of important tips and leads for me, because they regularly come across works of interest in the course of their broad-ranging research into artifacts, topics and individuals.

This is why since the start of the project we have been able to select over 1,000 titles, enter them into our catalog, and in most cases acquire them as well. We mostly find books on the Internet. Since most of them are not available in regular bookshops, our searches are not always successful. Fortune does smile upon us occasionally, however. For example, in my very first month on the job I happened to meet an American antiquarian who had contacted the Museum on other business, and learned about our project that way. It sparked his interest immediately and he compiled a comprehensive list of possible acquisitions from his collection for me, all works on Jewish art. This allowed me to acquire, rapidly and without further ado, quite a number of rare books we had priviously been lacking.

A particular challenge in this second year of the project will be to acquire so-called gray literature, or publications that were never published commercially and are hard to find. Such material is often published in small quantities by small institutions, galleries and local initiatives. It may well be the only source of information available for the documentation of minor Jewish exhibition and museum projects and is therefore of great interest to us.

Once books arrive, they have to be assigned a shelf mark and key words so they can be easily found in our catalog—and yes, of course: they are crying out to be read…

Lea Weik, Library

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/01/research-library-for-jewish-art/feed/0Searching for the New Germanshttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/05/searching-for-the-new-germans/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/05/searching-for-the-new-germans/#commentsTue, 27 May 2014 07:00:09 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=2109A Visit to the Academy’s Reading Room

Why do we keep books like Muslime im säkularen Rechtsstaat (Muslims in Secular Rule of Law), Diaspora Identities, or z.B. 650 Jahre Rixdorf (E.g. 650 Years of Rixdorf) at the Jewish Museum? Answering this question is the task of the Academy Programs on Migration and Diversity. How to find these books, however, falls to the library.

Imagine that you want to learn about social structures, clubs, and immigrant biographies in Berlin, particularly in Kreuzberg, to which you yourself moved from Hesse two years ago. After visiting the museum one fine Sunday afternoon, you take a look at the new Academy, where, you heard, a friend of yours recently attended an event about the ‘new Germans.’ The Academy is closed on the weekend, but a museum host informs you that it has a library. You return on Monday and ask in the reading room about Turks in Kreuzberg. The librarian would love just to tell you, “second shelf on the left, all the way to the back – what you’re looking for is right there.” Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.

We have, in fact, expanded the classification system (see this PDF-file, in German) in our open stacks on the topic of ‘Migration and Diversity.’ In contrast to how we classify Jewish history, we’ve chosen to forego regional and historical distinctions. Rather, we have tried to render different aspects of debates over the transformation from homogeneous nation states into immigration societies visible: from politics and law, religion, and minorities to education, racism, and discrimination. After all, along with the parallels between diaspora identities, there are also significant differences: while German-Jewish history goes back a good two thousand years in places such as Cologne, Frankfurt, Altona, and Berlin, Germany as a country of immigrants dates to a more recent time. In addition to this consideration, we wanted to put terms like citizenship and keywords like parallel society into an international perspective right from the start.

But back to you. You don’t follow the librarian’s advice to search for ‘Berlin’ in the online catalog. Instead you go straight to the shelf with the new classifications for ‘Migration and Diversity.’ There, you happen upon E.g. 650 Years of Rixdorf under the heading ‘Literature, Art, and Culture.’ You start planning your next weekend outing, but it’s almost 7 p.m. now and the librarian is urging your departure. In the meantime you’ve flipped through the pages of the catalog Berlin – Istanbul, glanced at the study Muslims in Berlin, and are just noticing the book Wir neuen Deutschen (We New Germans) among several other auto-/biographies – for which ‘German History’ would perhaps have been a more obvious category, but still all too easy to miss. On your way home through Oranienplatz, you remember the tents that were here until recently. Refugees, the right of residency, asylum. There must be something at the Jewish Museum about that too…

To finish, here’s a tip: Generation “Kosher Light”, p. 232 ff. You won’t find the book, by the way, under ‘Migration and Diversity’ but rather ‘The Present’, in the ‘Jewish History in Germany’ section. A Russian Jewish perspective on diversity in Kreuzberg.

Bernhard Jensen, Library

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/05/searching-for-the-new-germans/feed/0“Was Goethe a Jew too?”http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/01/was-goethe-a-jew-too/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/01/was-goethe-a-jew-too/#commentsThu, 23 Jan 2014 10:35:50 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=1667When you do a search of our library catalog for Goethe you could get this idea: 70 hits for works by or about the German poet (by contrast, Schiller only gets 16). And until a few years ago the impressive 1867 Cotta’schen edition of Goethe appeared in our permanent exhibition. Many people used to ask the visitor’s desk: “Was Goethe Jewish?” No, he wasn’t. But for many Jews he was the paragon of German culture, and his works symbolized membership in the German educated middle-class.

A few months ago, the Richard M. Meyer Foundation gave us more than 100 books by and about Richard M. Meyer himself. The son of a banker, art collector, and man of letters was a Goethe scholar. Meyer never acquired a proper professorship, but his 1895 biography of Goethe won awards and was published again and again – as a single volume, in multiple volumes, as a people’s edition and a reserved edition. According to the biography, Goethe saw “nationalities merely as transitional forms” (Volksausgabe [People’s Edition] 1913, p. 352). Statements like this illustrate the dilemma of German-Jewish assimilation during that period. If a Jewish reader of Goethe placed the poet’s cosmopolitanism in the foreground, he exposed himself to the accusation of misunderstanding the German essence of his writings. But when he explicitly recognized just this quality in Goethe’s language, his very right to have a say was contested.

As Meyer emphasized, the German “intellectual hero” did in fact employ the idea of a world literature, as well as biblical references, too: He compared the Faustian pact with the devil with the “basic motif of the wager” from the Book of Job (ibid, p.343; not included in the first edition, cf. p.356). And yet Goethe wasn’t a “ticket of admission” (Heine) to German culture: Richard M. Meyer was never baptized. He died in 1914 of cerebral apoplexy. His wife Estella, to whom the Goethe biography is dedicated, was murdered in July of 1942.

We would like you to know that we have moved into the new Academy building, with a reading room outfitted with fast computers, bright desk lamps, and a copy machine. If we sparked your interest in the Jewish reception of Goethe: please come by!

Bernhard Jensen, Library

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/01/was-goethe-a-jew-too/feed/2Oy Vey, Meshuggehttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/10/oy-vey-meshugge-or-are-you-up-for-this-plan/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/10/oy-vey-meshugge-or-are-you-up-for-this-plan/#commentsMon, 07 Oct 2013 09:26:02 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=1420Or: Are You up for this Plan?

During the week of 21 to 27 October 2013, the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin, in cooperation with Kulturkind e.V., will host readings, workshops, and an open day for the public with the theme “Multifaceted: a book week on diversity in children’s and young adult literature.” Employees of various departments have been vigorously reading, discussing, and preparing a selection of books for the occasion. Some of these books have already been introduced here over the course of the last weeks.
“Meshugge” is one of the words Ace uses to comment on stuff in the children’s novel When Life Gives You O.J. Ace is the extraordinary grandpa of Zelda Fried aka Zelly, Zellybelly, Zeldale, or Zelly-bean. Grandpa has a plan that Zelly finds completely meschugge, as well as downright dumb. But what on earth is a girl to do? She has told her grandpa she is up for the scheme, and Ace would never understand if she were to back out now, or if she failed to muster the chutzpah* to see the thing through. And in any case, there’s still a chance grandpa’s plan may succeed. In which case Zelly’s dearest dream would finally come true—perhaps even before her eleventh birthday!

How will mom, dad, and her little brother, Sam react? All of them love grandpa but they also know he can be more than a little crazy. With a twinkle in her eye, Zelda’s late grandma Bubbles often called him “the wisest man in Chelm”—but what does that mean exactly?
What if her friend Allie turns away from her in total embarrassment? Zelly would like to ask for her advice. But Allie has gone to summer camp for a few weeks, leaving Zelly feeling lonesome. It is only a short while since she moved from Brooklyn to Vermont, so friends are still rare, and the territory unfamiliar.
Zelly finds herself imagining how her new classmate Nicky Benoit will react. He has already teased her about her name—now, he’ll be claiming “Smelly Fried Egg” has scrambled brains! He’ll make her a laughing stock in all Vermont, in the entire region. But then Zelly accepts her grandpa’s challenge. And by the end of summer vacation, she has to admit that no one realizes the stuff she is made of until she surprises herself.

Yet before Zelly reaches this conclusion, summertime and the vacation have slipped away. Will the plan come to fruition and her greatest dream come true? Wait and see! (And even if you don’t plan to check out what the plan was, read the book anyhow—it will be well worth your while!)

* PS: At the back of the book is “A Glossary of Yiddish Words by Zelda Irene Fried.” Here, our heroine explains for example, what “chutzpah” means:

“My mom says this means ‘nerve.’ My dad says you say this about someone who does something outrageous. Here is his example: A beggar asks for food, saying he has no money and will pay next week. The baker feels sorry and gives him a dozen bagels. The beggar then points out that the bakery rule is that if you get twelve bagels, you get an extra one free and demands a thirteenth bagel. ‘That’s chutzpah,’ is what my dad says. Chutzpah can also mean ‘courage.’ For example, it would take a lot of chutzpah to jump in a pond that might have leeches in it.”

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/10/oy-vey-meshugge-or-are-you-up-for-this-plan/feed/0A Library Leaps Across the Streethttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/08/a-library-leaps-across-the-street/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/08/a-library-leaps-across-the-street/#commentsThu, 01 Aug 2013 07:54:46 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=1206We have been nudged, with some pizzazz, into a situation of good luck: at last we have an open-access library. After various construction delays, we finally had a date set to move. We were supposed to be transferring from our secluded rooms on the third floor of the Libeskind Building to the new Academy Building across the street from the museum, also built by Daniel Libeskind.

While some of us were directing the book-packers in the warehouse, others were confronting the question of how to set up this new reading room with open access. Visitors would at last be able to come and go without signing in. Missing shelf labels needed to be replaced with makeshift printouts from our classification system. Information about our opening hours had to be hung at the entrance. In addition, the transport needed to be organized of rare materials from the warehouse across the street to the new reading room. On top of all this, we could not lose track, in the midst of the moving boxes, of a set of packages containing an extensive new donation to our collection. When we finally opened our doors, we learned that there would be a press event: the photographers were instantly taken with the RFID-Gate that lights up in red if someone tries to steal a book. We opened the doors again symbolically for the RBB evening television program and made our progress official: direct access to the books at last.

Then they actually came: our new visitors. They looked around curiously, through the shelves along the slanting walls. They browsed at our new acquisitions shelf, and, finding something, would sit down at the desks or into a comfortable red armchair next to the magazines. They asked whether they may check out books (no) and whether we have suggestions for their research (usually yes). They came and went with friendly hellos, whispering quietly to each other and then moving on into the Diaspora Garden. When we install our faster computers, new desk lamps, and a copy machine – all coming soon – then I hope they will all come again and share our delight in this leap we’ve made across the street.

Bernhard Jensen, Library

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/08/a-library-leaps-across-the-street/feed/0R.B. Kitaj, the Bibliophilehttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2012/09/r-b-kitaj-the-bibliophile/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2012/09/r-b-kitaj-the-bibliophile/#commentsFri, 14 Sep 2012 07:00:51 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=95Kitaj once said that books are for him what trees are for a landscape painter. His ateliers in the London neighborhood of Chelsea and in Westwood, Los Angeles, were crammed full of books, on shelves, around his easels and piled up on the floor.

He was already ranging through the cheap bookshops on 4th Avenue – the largest bookselling district in the world – on his way to Cooper Union when he was a student there. He found the modern classics like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Kafka, as well as journals such as the “Partisan Review” and the American surrealist magazine “View.” In Oxford, his teacher Edgar Wind introduced him to the Warburg School and he bought a complete set of the famous “Journals of the Warburg Institute.” His visual imagination was fuelled by the illustrations for the “Afterlife of Antiquity,” copperplate engravings made according to ancient templates. In 1969, Kitaj published as silkscreens 50 book jackets from his personal library, in an edition that he called “In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library after the Life for the Most Part.”

Kitaj gave many of his works titles derived from books, such as “The Autumn of Central Paris,” which describes the expulsion of the proletariat from central Paris to the periphery, or “If Not, Not,” which plays on the oath of the Aragonese in the Middle Ages.

Above all, however, book illustrations were the source for many pictures, for instance the image of Fidgety-Philip tipping over in his chair, from the children’s book by Heinrich Hoffmann “Slovenly Peter,” that appears in the painting “London by Night.”

In his self-portrait “Unpacking My Library” (1990/91), Kitaj appears while unpacking boxes of his books. The title of the picture alludes to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “I unpack my library. A talk on collecting” from 1931, which Kitaj read in the first English edition of Benjamin’s “Illuminations” in 1968. The artist identified himself with Benjamin as a book collector, by donning latter’s eyeglasses and mustache in his picture. The sight of books scattered around packing boxes unleashes a “tidal wave of memories,” so said Benjamin, before the “quiet boredom of order” on the shelves erects a dam against it. Both men could recall the adventurous story of how they discovered and purchased each book.
All of Kitaj’s impressions, what he read, what he saw, what struck him, and what happened to him – he documented it all in his pictures. In this sense, they are “all autobiographical.” Thus the pictures and the books of his library became his Heimat, his real, his emotional, home.